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Introduction
Media has become more diverse and the number of media has increased in the last 20 years. Due to the growth of the available media, it has been harder and harder to deliver marketing messages to potential consumers. As a result, product placement has brought to marketers attention tremendously because of its efficacy. It is also an effective way to reach existing and potential customers (Mackay et al., 2009). Product placement, also called embedded marketing, refers to the inclusion or reference of a product or a brand in a program. It is also defined as “the paid inclusion of branded products or brand identifiers, through audio and/or visual means, within mass media programming” (Karrh, 1998, p. 33). This marketing strategy has been applied to silent films since early twentieth century (Gunning, 1986). It next moved to the TV programs around 1950s and finally to the internet around 1990s (Villafranco and Zeltzer, 2006). It is found that placing a brand in a movie would influence people’s implicit memory and implicit choice behavior (Yang and Roskos-Ewoldsen, 2007). Besides the placement to the traditional medium such as movie, TV, radio, DVR, video games, books, and magazines, the positioning of product image has extended to new medium such as the internet and mobile phones (Stephen and Coote, 2005).
Social media is referred as consumer-generated media. It describes “a variety of new and emerging sources of online information that are created, initiated, circulated and used by consumers intent on educating each other about products, brands, services, personalities and issues” (Nielsen BuzzMetrics, 2006). Social media has evolved to offer in a variety of formats which includes blogs, microblogging (e.g. Twitter), user-sponsored blogs/web sites (e.g. unofficial forums), company-sponsored blogs/web sites (e.g. official forums), collaborative web sites (e.g. Wikipedia), social networking sites (e.g. Facebook, MySpace), virtual social worlds (e.g. Second Life), virtual game worlds (e.g. online games), content sharing web sites (e.g. Youtube), etc. Due to the emergence of the social media, companies in different industries have started to use it as part of their marketing strategies to promote their brands, products, and services. Companies have also used social media to understand their existing and potential customers (Hafele, 2011). For their marketing conducts, Akar and Topçu (2011) specified the factors affecting...